Canada's Dionne Tops Olympic Champion At Diving Meet CanSport, May 05, 1999

Canadian Divers Lead Medal Standings At International Meet CanSport, May 05, 1999

Canadians 1-2 At Canada Cup Diving Meet CanSport, May 01, 1999

Comtois Springs To Victory At Canada Cup Diving Meet CanSport, April 30, 1999

Christopher Kalec is a hard-working CEGEP student of the sciences, an accomplished competitive diver, and the founder, lead guitarist, vocalist and even the booking agent of the alternative rock band Blind Haze.

You don't have their CD yet, because most CDs need more than four songs. But don't rush them.

And thanks to his fledgling musical career, he's become a superstitious young man.

Kalec has taken his guitar on the road precisely twice : the first time, he injured himself ; the last time, his diving pretty much resembled a rock being lobbed off an overpass.

"But now, I'm beginning to wonder whether I can't get over this, starting small," Kalec wonders today. "Maybe I'll bring it to a provincial championship to start, just to see how it goes."

Kalec will be among the 60 divers taking part in the four-day FINA Grand Prix Canada Cup competition at Centre Claude-Robillard beginning this morning. For Kalec, who will dive in 1-, 3- and 10-metre events, it will be a rare, welcome opportunity to compete at home.

"There's nothing better," he says. "The crowd is with you and you don't have to get used to time zones and a new pool. This will hardly be like a competition, until just before it begins."

Kalec, a 10-time national champion (nine won as an age-grouper), came to diving from the swimming pool at the Pointe Claire Aquatic Centre, a 7-year-old who preferred a vertical adventure. He went through Pointe Claire's renowned Learn to Dive program and trained for a time under Yi Hua Li, the accomplished coach of national-team veteran Anne Montminy, before finally relocating to CAMO at Claude Robillard. There, coach Michel Larouche produces top athletes on an assembly line - CAMO has nine of 17 national-team members.

Kalec, 19, is a second-year sciences student at John Abbott College, giving him a wonderful, awful triangular commute from his Laval home to the Ste. Anne de Bellevue campus to north-end Robillard.

When he's not training or competing, he fronts Blind Haze, a three-man group that includes two CAMO teammates: his younger brother, David, on drums, and Etienne Gauthier on bass. They practice weekends at his home and expect to rehearse a lot more once school is out to build their current repertoire of four songs, their own "manipulations," as Kalec puts it, of the tunes of Metallica, Guns 'N Roses and Lenny Kravitz.

Their first scheduled gig, at this summer's age-group nationals, was shelved when it conflicted with Kalec's participation in the World University Games. And the fact that his brother is only 15 won't help get them booked any time soon by local bars and nightclubs.

"It will be a bit of time before we get going," Kalec admits, "but we'll try to get into a recording studio this summer to do a demo tape or maybe produce a few CDs. We'll send them off and who knows what can happen?"

Of more immediate concern is this weekend's meet, the first of three Grand Prix circuit stops in North America. A number of champions from the 1996 Atlanta Olympics will compete, including Russia's Dmitri Sautin, and Fu Mingxia and Yu Zhoucheng of China.

The event will serve as a useful checkpoint, and more, for Canadian diving team head coach Mitch Geller, who will take a team of six to this summer's Pan-Am Games in Winnipeg.

"This isn't part of the Olympic homestretch, but it is an important part of the selection process," said Geller, who hopes to qualify a full eight-diver complement for the Sydney Games. "We have plenty of depth with our women, but we're a little concerned by the men."

The Canadian women's program offers an embarrassment of riches, headlined by 1997 World Cup titlists Myriam Boileau and Eryn Bulmer, '97 world junior champion Emilie Heymans, and 16-time national champion and Canadian platform record-holder Montminy, a veteran of two Olympics and more international competitions than she can count.

The men's side features wonderboy Alexandre Despatie, 13, the 1998 Commonwealth Games platform gold medalist, and Philippe Comtois, a 21-time national champion who is ranked sixth in the world on 3 metres, the best ever by a Canadian male.

But the men's pool shallows sharply after that, and beginning today Geller is expecting the rest of the team to step up and meet the challenge.

With or without his six-string, a good result against some of the sport's greatest names would indeed be music to Christopher Kalec's ears.

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A page reviewed on May 6, 1999 by